More rants of a dead man

I do most of my programming in java and I use eclipse which just makes everything real easy. I can refactor, flip between source files, look up every instance of something with a few keystrokes and in a matter of seconds.

This past week I had to work on fixing a C program I wrote a few years ago. My dev environment for C programs isn’t quite as snappy as my java environment and I had to do a bunch of things the old school way. A text editor, a compiler that I actually have to invoke rather that being run automatically every time I hit save and so on.

It was a much smaller program than anything I usually work on but because of the environment involved, everything went a lot slower. I had to wait longer between writing something and testing, and between saving and compiling, and between debugging a line and seeing the watch variables get updated. Every little step of the entire process is slower.

And it makes the whole thing take longer as a result, but interestingly, it keeps my attention. While you’re in the thick of programming, getting distracted is the kiss of death, so I have to maintain my concentration for much longer periods of time, which gives me more time to think in the context in which I’m working, and gives
me time to think through some of the things I’m doing so that I do the right thing the first time instead of doing it wrong and then doing it again, but it’s so quick it doesn’t matter.

And the time just whipped right by, and I’m wondering if that’s not where my love of programming went. Killed by the rapid application development environment.

Making programming brainlessly easy (java combined with eclipse) takes the fun out of it. When was the last time I had to worry about a deallocating memory to avoid a memory leak? Years. Have I had a need to make something go so fast that it could only be done in a non-java language? Not in a long long time. 1991 I think. They just keep making hardware faster and faster.

I’m a dying breed I guess.

It has been long known that the NA in nazi stands for network administrator, but it wasn’t until last week that a friend of mine enlightened me to the full meaning of the acronym: Network Administrator Zero Internet.

In other news, having recently learned about the details of how closures are implemented (in javascript anyway) it seems to me that closures isn’t a terribly good word to describe the effect and instead I think the technique should be called “Flying Scope.”

I just had the best idea for an iphone application. Go ahead steal my idea but give me credit, and some money.
A friend of mine just lost his iphone to the washing machine.
First of all, I can’t imagine why they’re not waterproof. They have no moving parts and there’s no externally accessible battery compartment, I can’t imagine why it’s not waterproof.
But anyway. Here’s my idea: an app that uses the motion sensor (and maybe even the camera) to detect when it’s being bounced around (as in a washing machine) and sends you an email saying “Help! I think I’m in the washing machine! Save me!”
If you have any amount of home automation set up, the iphone could power off the washing machine itself and save itself.
Just an idea there.

I went to the ear doctor a year or so ago to get custom made earplugs because those little squishy ones hurt my ears. He asked me what I wanted them for and I said mowing the lawn and motorcycling things like that.
Apparently he doesn’t like motorcycles and thinks anybody who rides one is dumb. He said that to me in not so many words.
At the end of the doctor visit I ask my customary doctor joke “So, I’m going to live?”
“Well, maybe not if you keep riding that bike.”

Well he lost my business.

But today a year later it just occurred to me, because I’m going on my first bike ride this year this weekend, that I actually ride my
bicycle more in a year than I do my motorcycle, definitely time-wise and even mileage-wise.
On my motorcycle I have a full face helmet, lots of leather with kevlar and all sorts of other shielding.
On my bicycle I wear a small piece of styrofoam on the top of my head and spandex.
On my motorcycle I’m going faster, sure, but I’m also going traffic speed, whereas on my bicycle I’m always going slower than traffic speed and as anybody with any driving experience knows it’s safer to do the traffic speed than the speed limit.
IE you want your speed delta to be as close to zero as possible.

So exactly how is riding a motorcycle less safe than bicycling? But noooooo… nobody has a problem if you say you ride a bicycle.

I have to say I was willing to tolerate google apps until today.
Now they’ve proven themselves to be the shittiest thing in the software world and here’s why.

I’m taking notes on personal things and I wanted to edit at work and home so I figured okay google docs.
So I started my doc today, added a bunch of stuff, came back later, added more.
Came back even more later and went to start typing and it said “trying to contact google…”
and it just sat there. AND IT WOULDN’T LET ME EDIT.

Okay, did we all read that correctly? A word processor that doesn’t function unless it can call home.
What a piece of shit. All this cloud stuff is for fuckheads.
This cements the reality that if you want something to work and be usable it’s got to be a fat client running locally.
I’ll take ms word with its 17 layers of recovery upon blowup over that google piece of shit.
Shit Shit Shit there’s just no other word for it.

Given the state of the small attention span theater, and facebook and the competition for doing free work (all that stuff people create and post on the youtube and whatnot) I don’t see how it can keep going on this way.

I’m starting to think there will be a backlash at some point, and it will start to be cool to hang out with people in real life and not spy on their every wink on facebook.
I know there’s already a small faction like this, but maybe it will become mainstream.

On that thought, maybe someday we will reminisce about the bad old record companies.

Don’t reel just yet. We hated IBM and loved Apple. We hated the phone company and the cable companies barely existed. Now verizon is at least in small parts respectable, at least compared to AT&T and the cable companies. Things change, and they do so fairly quickly.

It could be that what replaces the record companies might be worse (try and imagine when jobs eventually dies), or more likely, more useless, such that the traditional record companies as fucked up as they are would be a better deal.

This is one of those things that some would consider a bureaucratic horror story, but it wasn’t really that bad. It’s just another tax in life you have to pay, like parking tickets. Sometimes you pay with money, sometimes you pay with time and aggravation. The advantage of paying with time and aggravation is that you can take other people with you on your way down.

I used to have the triple play thing with Verizon, phone, TV and innernet, and whenever I got my bill I was always pissed all all those bullshit taxes and fees and surcharges and fees to collect the surcharge on behalf of the government which is taxing me in other ways as well. Not to mention the MTA tax. Love that one.

Anyway, I decided to switch to magic jack which is $20 a YEAR (got that verizon? A YEAR) but I wanted to keep my old phone number because the effort of finding and fixing the hundreds of companies that have tied me to that phone number is greater than  the expense of porting the number away.

Or so I thought.

Verizon being a phone company to the core had to come up with a way to deal with people who didn’t have a phone number now that they sell TV and innernet, with the possibility of getting one of those services without getting phone service and therefore having no phone number. Apparently they worked out how to do it, and it involves having an account that’s of a different type than those with a phone number.

So poor me who simply wanted to take my triple play and turn it into a double play ended up causing a most unique thing to happen. Instead of just removing my phone service (because apparently you can’t take phone service away from a phone account) they made a new account, added the TV and innernet to it and then canceled the old phone account.

Sounds logically reasonable if not straightforward. But there are two downsides to this treatment.

1) they didn’t tell me.

2) when they sent me the final bill for the prorated cost of the triple play on the old account, and I used the verizon bill pay web site to pay it, instead of crediting my old phone account (which was the only account I thought I had) it credited my new double play account.

I did not know, I did not care, they sent me a bill, I agreed to the prorated amount, and I used their web site to pay it. I did everything right. No worries.

Fast forward 3 months (because while the rest of us are using 3Ghz core 2 quads, the phone company is using a single 386/16 for all their IT needs and it takes them forever to do anything involving moving data through computers) I get a letter of collection from a collection agency.

Always one to enjoy the lottery, I called the number on the paper to find out who was sending me to collection. And who was it? Verizon of course, for lack of payment of my phone bill.

Sigh. Let the adventure begin.

I will say that I only had to make 3 phone calls (this was late october) to figure out what happened. It turns out that I did in fact get the final bill, I did in fact pay it in full, but oh no, verizon credited the wrong account. And so the old phone account went unpaid. Verizon made no attempt to contact me in any way about that unpaid bill, they just sent me to collection. They’re the phone company they have a process for everything, even dying.  I know, I used to work for AT&T, but that’s another story for another time.

At the end of the 3rd phone call, we worked out that in fact I did owe the amount they said I did, but I decided not to take it in the ass without a little fight, so after I finally got them to clearly admit that it was not my fault, I not so kindly suggested that they might consider giving me a discount for my efforts in having to deal with this when the fault was clearly theirs as I paid in full every bill they sent me using their system yet I was sent to collection for lack of payment. She gave me 25% off. I should have held out for more, but I was trying to make a point, and I did. (that whole taking other people down with me thing I mentioned earlier.)

Great.  I called the collection agency and I paid 75% of the balance due, (because verizon won’t take payments on bills sent to collection) and verizon said they were going to credit the rest of my account, push it to the collection agency and it will all go away. Problem solved. No worries.

Fast forward 2 more weeks and I get a letter from the collection agency saying I owe them $20.83, the amount of the 25% discount.

Sigh. The adventure continues.

I called verizon to see what they have to say, and it seems they have a front line of call-at-home center people (I could tell because I could hear the children screaming in the background) who have the gift of being able to decipher the phone company billing system. Even if it spans two accounts. The phone company certainly has come a long way since the advent of competition in the early 80’s. This nice fellow took only 2 minutes to come to the conclusion that I was paid in full and shouldn’t have an outstanding balance anywhere. OUTSTANDING!

So I called the collection agency, they say their computers insist I still owe them $20.83.

So I called verizon back and got another call-at-home center person with that same gift who also agreed that I owed nothing and maybe I should just wait another two weeks and check back as maybe the credit hadn’t posted to the collection agency yet.

This second guy did me one little favor though. He mentioned that verizon has a “payments and collections” department. Well I knew right then that I wanted to talk to THOSE people.  He connected me and wouldn’t give me a direct number. And after the usual phone company standard hold time I was connected to somebody who sounded like they weren’t going to budge, but eventually conceded my point. Her math showed that I still did in fact owe $20.83 at which point I muttered under my breath “oh no, we’re not having this fight again.” and then she went back and did some more math and came up with the same zero balance my other two verizon friends had come up with.

So now we’re all in agreement. I don’t owe anything, but alas, the collection agency still thinks I do. Previous notes on the account (from the late october phone calls) indicate that in fact none of this was my fault, so I explained that now that somebody important from “payments and collections” agrees that I don’t owe anything, what can we do about making the collection agency agree, and more importantly, how can I remove this black mark from my credit history so that I don’t get mauled by the bank when I go to refinance my mortgage.

This was really the crux of my goal. I long ago lost most of the enjoyment I ever got from making phone company employees suffer, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let their screwup tarnish my otherwise sparkly credit rating.

So she wrote all sorts of important things on the notes of my account, and then told me she was going to transfer me to an even MORE important credit reporting department who have the god-like power of being able to remove black marks from your credit report.

And she gave me their direct number.

And while I’d love to make some money selling this information, I’m feeling particularly generous at the moment. Here it is: 877 325 5156

Have a good time. Call them early and often. These guys are probably a very valuable resource so wasting their time must cost the phone company more money than wasting any other phone company rep’s time. Take full advantage. They’re nice people so be nice to them, but by all means Waste Their Time.

So it was only another few short standard phone company hold times later when the guy kindly informed me that I would be receiving a letter with shiny verizon letterhead and account numbers and circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back explaining what it was so that if I ever had to prove I did not belong on the collection list I’d have this piece of paper to show in my defense.

And he put through the request to the four credit bureaus (I thought there were only three) and this entire mess would be all cleaned up in no more than 2 billing cycles.

I asked the google calculator to convert 2 verizon billing cycles to days  and it was unable.  I also asked the wolfram alpha engine, and it gave me a stock quote.

From this, I surmise, that the wolfram alpha engine is superior to google calculator, but The Phone Company is superior to them both.

So I won. Or lost depending on how you look at it, and you know I’m going to call back in some random period of time that I think passes for 2 verizon billing cycles and see if everything is still in the clear, but at the moment, I think I finally caged the beast.

I thought of something by accident the other day:

In the thousands-of-years-ago days, people lived in tribes. There was a mutual benefit to live with your family, help raise the kids, hunt, gather, protect from animals and other tribes and so on.
But you were born into a tribe and that was it unless you got married off into another tribe in trade for some land concession or water rights or something.

But nowadays we live alone as individual families, Even the next generation up doesn’t live together with you.
So in trade, we’ve invented the office. The office is a place where you go every day to fill the need of not living with a tribe anymore.
And here’s the beauty of it: You Get To Pick Your Tribe.

If you don’t like this office tribe, you can quit and go join another one.

So by default you blow off your family. You COULD choose to live with them, but nobody actually does that, so you create a tribe of friends and you create a tribe of coworkers whom you select based on them being tolerable.

Ahhh what a great society we live in.

Re: the girl who quit on whiteboard pictures….
A lot of these things are hoaxes, but does it matter? It isn’t even worth checking to see if it’s a hoax, because the point is entertainment value, and you get the same entertainment whether or not it is a hoax, no?
The newspapers should do their research before they publish, but even then, does it really affect anybody, so what if newspapers run BS stories?
They do all the time anyway. You know all those headlines that make news for 2 days, they’re slow news days so they pick up on some stupid bit of research somewhere then blow it up into a big story so they have something to put on their front page, then it goes away, because it’s not really news in the first place.
It may not be a hoax, but it certainly isn’t news fit to print.

I think the newspapers and radio news stations are doing a disservice to their industry by blowing things out of proportion because in the event of a real news story, who’s going to take it seriously?

All of my mental facilities that I find are diminishing in some way, I attribute to age and lack of sleep.
But while it’s happening to me, it is also happening to everybody else which made me eventually realize how the big corporate game was played.
Consider, you are at your best when you’re about 20. You’re young, inspired, just entering the workforce, you’re going to change the world. You don’t have any family or any big time-consuming responsibilities. So the big corporation works you to the bone for peanuts.
As you get older you get promoted, you get more prestigious titles, more vacation time and more money. But you’re not as fast as you used to be, you can’t concentrate on one thing as long as you used to be able to, and you get tired more quickly. You spend less of your off time thinking about work because you’re distracted by family responsibilities etc.
Yet the years go on, you decay more and more yet you keep getting promotions and raises.
At some point you realize that your 20 year old self could wipe the floor with you. Certainly I remember things I did in my 20s that I can’t believe I actually did and certainly could not do now if my life depended on it. Yet here I am with a lot more title and money.

So you say, the difference is experience. I agree, I don’t make mistakes that I did 20 years ago, I know how to design things that scale, I know what pitfalls to avoid because I’ve been down the wrong road so many times before.
But I’m also a lot less creative. My experience causes me to think outside the box less. I always solve the same problem the same exact way, never thinking to try something else, because what I’ve been doing for 20 years works fine. Maybe it IS the best answer, but maybe it’s not. But I’m less creative because I know my usual answer so well, so I wouldn’t think of anything better anyway. So
that’s a wash.
So why as I get older and feebler do I make more money?

Because the whole thing is one big game. And everybody’s playing it, and everybody secretly KNOWS everybody’s playing it, and the first rule of the game is to not admit that there’s a game. Better than fight club, eh?

If you play ball, the same people who are wondering why they’re being given raises for being older and slower will be giving you a raise. It’s like the circle of life.

Every once in a while some 30 year old punk decides to break from the pack and start firing all the old codgers who’ve been with the company 20+ years because
they cost too much and don’t produce as much as the 20 year olds.

So the game players in congress pass laws about age discrimination.

It is truly a brilliant game.